Piano Sonata No. 29 in B flat major, Op. 106 ("Hammerklavier")

Length is not charged: the scale is compelled by an argument that must travel from the fanfare’s assertion to F sharp minor, the farthest key of the work, and back by a search. The subtractive test meets resistance at the joints. The opening leap seeds the descending thirds; without the Adagio the fugue has nothing to answer; the Largo is the passage back, and without it the fugue arrives from nowhere. It finds give in three places: the Scherzo, brief and partly a parody of the opening, a lighter hinge than its place needs; the fugue’s long trilled sequences and middle episodes; and the maker’s own licence, for the London edition, to reorder the movements or drop the Largo or the fugue. Held below Winterreise’s 8.9 for that.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Disclosure through sound is credited fully, and here it can be stated: order is not inherited but made, and made against resistance. The first movement asserts a law in its fanfare, and the development breaks it into a semitone’s distance, B minor against B flat. The Adagio goes as far from home as the system allows and stays there, a grief that does not console itself. The way back is not a return but a search: the Largo tries keys and textures and abandons them, until a fugue is built “con alcune licenze”, its rules strained to breaking. Recovery is labour, not grace. Held below the top because the listener assembles the proposition from a wordless course, and the Scherzo’s irony is left unplaced in it.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Height is reached often, and in more than one register. The sublime of grandeur: the opening fanfare, the left hand’s leap to a full chord, forte, and the first movement’s massed climaxes. The sublime of grief and beauty: the Adagio throughout, its long first theme in F sharp minor, the turn to G major that opens the movement’s light, the coda’s return to the opening phrase at its quietest. The sublime of the unknown: the Largo, groping through keys with silences between. The sublime of terror and energy: the fugue’s trills and its subject driven in augmentation against the other voices, then a still episode in D major before the storm resumes. Held from the top because the Scherzo is flat by design and parts of the fugue are force more than elevation.

Score: 9.3 / 10

An archetype is built, not only evoked: the night journey, and the making of a world from chaos. The plan is load-bearing. An assertion of power; a descent into the farthest darkness the key system holds; a threshold where nothing keeps its form, the Largo, unbarred in part, trying possibilities and dropping them; and then a creation that is a law imposed by force, the fugue’s subject launched by a leap and a trill. The Largo is the work’s chaos before creation, and the finale stands on it. What holds the axis is the particular, which instrumental music keeps thinly: no person, place or act is named, and the archetype is built from tonal distance and form alone. Level with the Goldberg Variations at 8.4.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance is the Classical sonata of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven’s own thirty years at it, with tonic and dominant the poles of every movement. The departures are many, and they are one wager: a sonata at the scale of a symphony; a tonal system of descending thirds in place of the fifth’s polarity, carried through all four movements; a development that settles a semitone from home; a long slow movement in the key farthest from the tonic; a Largo that is improvisation written down; a finale fugue whose heading declares its licences. The stake was real: its tempi and its difficulty were written past the players of its day. Held below the top because the road was partly his own: Op. 101 and Op. 102 no. 2 had already put fugues into late sonata finales.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows: that order recovered is made, not returned to. A finale in rondo or sonata form would come home; the fugue, the form of law, has to be built voice by voice, and its licences are the form’s knowledge that the law strains. The Largo is form as search, a transition that is the content. The descending third is the form’s grammar at every scale, from motive to key plan, so that the Adagio’s F sharp minor and the development’s B minor are the same law driven to its edges. As a suite of character pieces the work would lose its argument. Held below the top at the Scherzo, tied to the plan by motive more than form, and at the fugue’s episodes, where the form fills time it has earned.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Evidence, not promise, and two centuries of it. The questions stay open: whether the note on the threshold of the first movement’s recapitulation is A sharp or A natural, argued by editors and analysts for over a century; whether Beethoven’s metronome marks, a minim at 138 for the first movement, mean what they say, which Schnabel’s recording of 1935 nearly took at their word and few have since; whether the fugue is triumph or violence; how the Scherzo belongs. The analytic literature is large and still yields, from Tovey’s edition and commentary to Charles Rosen’s writing on the sonatas. The performance tradition is a record of contest: Liszt, Bülow, Schnabel, Solomon, Gilels, Brendel, Pollini. Held a tenth below the top because the literature is weighted to the last century.

Score: 9.4 / 10

The work reorganised what a piano sonata could be: in scale, in tonal law, and in putting the old learned fugue at the summit of the new genre’s argument. Its reach is concentrated in the sonata rather than spread across music, and the late style’s deepest influence ran through the quartets as much as through the sonatas; both are discounted, as is the delay. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed, then decisive. Little heard for a generation, it became through Liszt the proof text of the piano sonata as a major form. Liszt’s own Sonata in B minor and the early sonatas of Brahms stand in its line, and the large Romantic sonata after it is unthinkable without its example. The line is credited, not each link.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: the work survives whole in the first edition of 1818, with the single bar Beethoven added at the head of the Adagio after engraving. One textual question is real, the A sharp, but it concerns a note, not a movement, and the work is in no doubt. Presence is the cost. Its public life began late, through Liszt, and it remains the least often played of the great sonatas because few can play it; but since the later nineteenth century it has stood continuously in the repertory of the major pianists and in the recorded catalogue. Fabric: little of its surface is fixed to its moment. Written past its instrument, it has needed no retouching on the modern piano. The late start is charged.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Read to the same anchors as every medium, the making bears weight throughout. One interval generates every movement without sounding schematic: the first movement’s exposition moves to G major, a third below, and every return obeys. The Adagio’s texture is as varied as any Beethoven wrote for the instrument: a long cantabile, then the melody embellished in figuration that keeps the line, una corda shading, the coda’s thinning. The fugue holds its subject in augmentation, in retrograde, in inversion, and combines it with a new subject in the D major episode; its licences are command, not lapse. The cost: the keyboard writing is in places against the hand, thick in the bass and congested in the fugue at tempo. Below the Goldberg’s 9.7 for that.

Score: 9.5 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the Scherzo’s Presto interruption, a joke in a sonata of this weight, and the Adagio’s grief in F sharp minor; or the Largo’s formlessness and the fugue’s strictest law. One law governs them, the descending third: it is the Scherzo’s motive, the Adagio’s key relation to the whole, the Largo’s chain of keys, and the fugue subject’s first leap, a tenth, folded down. Even the semitone shocks, B minor in the first movement and the Adagio’s distance, are the law extended to its edge, not broken. The range governed is wide for one instrument: fanfare, parody, lament, improvisation and counterpoint. The tension is the Scherzo, which obeys the law of intervals more than the argument, and the licence Beethoven gave for London to reorder the movements.

Score: 9.4 / 10

A wordless piano work holds more orders than its medium suggests, through its registers. Consciousness, in a subject passing from assertion through grief to labour; the learned tradition, in a fugue that carries Bach and Handel into the sonata; the public and ceremonial, in the fanfare and the first movement’s grandeur; the comic, in the Scherzo; the sacred, unnamed, in the chorale-like stillness of the D major episode and the prayer of the Adagio’s close. They are held on one law, not listed. What holds the axis here is absence: the state, history, labour, the family and the natural order do not appear, and nothing outside one mind and its art is held. Above the Goldberg’s 7.4 for its range of states; below Winterreise’s 7.7, whose words bring in a town and the weather.

Score: 7.5 / 10